


Aviophobia

by Deviant_Accumulation



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Fear of Flying, M/M, Pairing if you Squint, The trigger warning is to be taken serious, Trigger Warning for Panic Attacks, graphic description of a panic attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deviant_Accumulation/pseuds/Deviant_Accumulation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Aviophobia is the term used to define an irrational fear of flying. Aviophobic symptoms can be mental, emotional and physical. The anxiety and fear can go from mild feelings of apprehension to a full-blown panic attack."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bird

**Author's Note:**

> Huge trigger warning for the graphic description of a panic attack.

“Can I get you anything else, sir?“ the stewardess asked, putting the glass of water, sponge and gauze bandage on the table, carefully maintaining her distance to Bond.

“No, thank you, that would be everything,“ he answered politely with a long-practiced fake-friendly smile on his face, though the stewardess didn't look any less anxious, her gaze flickering repeatedly to Q, before she turned around and left the cabin.  
James sighed. It was never good to attract too much attention, and having an unconscious, bleeding co-passenger was definitely not the way to go. 

James took the soft sponge, let it soak with warm water and started to carefully clean the blood out of Q's mob of hair. It was a head wound, so there was quite a lot of it, though the wound itself was pretty harmless. In the worst case Q might have gotten a concussion, but the chances weren't very high.

By now it had been half an hour since they completed the mission. Half an hour since the remaining members of the drug cartel, stationed in Berlin, Germany, had decided that even though they had completely destroyed their organisation, they would still have their revenge on Q and James.  
Which ended with a lot of shooting, a chase, and Q hitting his head in a moment of bad luck (which seemed to follow James constantly).

From there on everything had gotten quite complicated and in the end he had to ring someone Berlin who still owed him a favour and owned a private plane, considering that they really couldn't wait for the next train to England (and him having to haul an unconscious Q through the train station would attract even more unwanted attention).

 

James had gotten out most of the blood of his hair when Q's eyes opened.

“Hey there, sleeping beauty,” James said, smirking as Q groaned and squeezed his eyes shut against the light.

“How are you feeling?” he asked more seriously.

“Impressive headache,” Q answered without opening his eyes. “Don't think I have a concussion though.”

James gave a relieved nod.

“Anything major happening when I was out cold?”

“I had to drag your ass half way through Berlin and got caught by a speed camera with someone else's car. Oh, and then there was the whole thing about angry people trying to shoot us.”

Q opened his eyes to blink blearily at James. “So we managed to outdistance them?” he asked.

“It's... a work in progress,” James admitted, trying not to let the nervousness show.

Q did notice it nonetheless and looked around, eyes scanning his surrounding more and more frantically.

“Are we on a plane?” he whispered nearly inaudible.

“Yes, yes we are.”

Q's head snapped around, wide eyes focussing on James.

“Look, I know you are scared of flying, but this is the only way we can outdistance them, there isn't any other alternative, so I have to ask you to get through this, okay?”

“I understand, really, but-” In that moment the engines came roaring to life and Q flinched violently in his seat.

“It's not that simple,” he pressed out, eyes screwing shut, hand clenching down on the sides of his head, covering his ears, trying to block out the sound of the turbines, the feeling of the plane speeding up and leaving the ground, the narrow, restrictive space in the cabin, the tiny windows-

“Q, Q look at me,” he heard James' voice through the haze. 

The agent knelt in front of him, looking up with concerned eyes, one of his hands rubbing soothing patterns on his leg.

Q frantically shook his head, keeping his eyes tightly closed, his whole body trembling, every fibre of his being tense with fear.

James reached up with the other hand, laying it gently against Q's cheek in a comforting gesture.

Q snapped, hitting and kicking at James everywhere he could, pushing him away before curling up on himself, legs drawn to his chest, head in his hands.

James had fallen on his back, faint pain in the places where Q had managed to hit him.  
He could hear Q taking in sharp, short breaths, the pattern too fast and irregular to be natural. Unsure how to react to the situation he crept closer, hands hovering centimetres above Q's legs. Q let out a muffled sob and the trembling became more pronounced.

'Seizure,' James' mind supplied and in one fast movement he pinned the smaller man's body underneath his as Q's limbs started to shake uncontrollably. Q let out a strangled cry, his hands clawing at James' back and shoulders. James held tight onto him as fingers dug into his jacket, tearing at the fabric.  
 _'There hadn't been any other way.'_ He repeated the sentence like a mantra as Q's body shook and trembled and the guilt was eating a hole in his chest with every scream he heard and wished he wouldn't.

Slowly the screams ceased and were replaced by short gasps that sounded more like sobs than breaths.

The seizures died down and Q went limp in his arms. Worried James looked up at Q's face.

His skin was a ghostly pale, damp with sweat and tears, glassy eyes wide open, the pupils small pinpoints, focussed on a point somewhere above James' head.

“It's burning,” he whispered, voice hoarse from the previous screaming. “Everything is burning.”

“Q,” Bond adjured him pleadingly, shaking him by his shoulders, trying to snap him out of whatever hallucinations he was seeing.  
It seemed to work, because Q's eyes flickered towards him.

“They're all dead,” he murmured before slumping forward, burying his face in James' shoulder.  
James held him as the tears soaked through his shirt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter has been lying around for eternities, but I have been to lazy to take care of it and let it get beta'd and sorta dropped out of the fandom and... been to lazy, but I'm posting it now (unbeta'd) because it really nags me that I've left this unfinished. Hope you have fun with it =)

All he could see was white. The white brightened and darkened like it was living, pulsing thing and it took his exhausted mind a few moments to understand that he was blinking at a white surface. He turned his head to the side to see what seemed to resemble the part of a room. There was a large window, with light blue drapes at the side, that matched the slightly darker blue of the walls. Next to the window hung a – quite boring and quite expensive – still life that showed an idyllic landscape scenery with overly fluffy clouds, which seemed even more fluffy now because of his impaired eye sight that made the shapes look fuzzy.

He heard the sound of a door opening and closing and turned his head to see the blurred form of a large man walking into the room.

“And here I thought you loathed everything that has to do with medical, Bond,” he said, voice hoarse from... sleep. He at least hoped so.

“And here I thought you couldn't see further than one metre without your glasses on,” Bond retorted, taking place on the chair that was standing next to Q's bed. The piece of furniture resembled a chair, contrary to most ordinary hospital chairs. That added upon the actually quite comfortable cotton he was laying on and the soft blanket draped over him -

“I'm at some secret clinic of MI6, am I?” he asked, more a rhetoric question, but Bond nodded anyways.

Q sighed. “Are my glasses anywhere here?”

“Right on the night stand.”

Q turned his head a bit more to see his thick-rimmed glasses resting upon a light green painted night stand. He tucked his arm out from under the blankets, pleased to see that no idiots had hooked him up to an IV this time, and grabbed his glasses, setting them on his nose.

The shapes became sharp and the room did indeed look just as boring as he had suspected.

He turned towards the much more visible Bond. The man had abandoned the suit he always seemed to wear on whatever mission he was (Q really didn't know why MI6 still equipped him with those; they cost a fortune and he ruined even more suits than pieces of equipment Q gave him for the missions) for a plain navy blue T-Shirt and a dark jeans. His blue eyes were just as piercing as always, but his shoulders were a bit slumped and stubble was starting to show on his face.

There was a long silence during which Q waited for Bond to start a conversation. Bond didn't fail to disappoint him by stoically saying nothing.

“So, mind filling me in with what happened between the plane and now?” he finally asked.

Bond's shoulders tensed just for a tiny fraction, not enough for a stranger to notice but after accompanying him on more missions than he cared to count, Q knew how to read the little signs Bond gave away despite how much he tried to hide him. It wasn't as if he was freely saying much anyway.

“You had a... panic attack,” James said hesitantly. “I tried to calm you down, though it didn't seem to work very much. You passed out approximately half an hour after it started, the doctors said it was most probably from exhaustion in combination with your head wound. We arrived in England without any further complications and got you to the hospital as fast as possible. You've been unconscious for seven hours, probably also because you didn't sleep that much during the mission.”

“Did I hurt you?”

Bond looked up a bit too sudden, taken off guard by the question.

“No, I'm fine.”

“I might not remember everything from my panic attacks, but I know that there was a lot of kicking and screaming involved, so stop lying to me, Bond.”  
“I already told you often enough, it's James by now.”  
“Stop dodging the question then, James.”  
James sighed. “It's just a couple of light bruises, nothing major.”  
“I'm sorry,” Q said earnestly.  
James narrowed his eyes at him. “There's nothing to be sorry for. It was my fault, since I was trying to hold you down when you had the seizure.”  
“You don't hold people down when they are having a panic attack.”  
“Because you normally lie them down on the floor so they can't fall out of their seats or harm themselves by hitting edgy things. Which was a bit very complicated in that moment.”  
“Fair enough I guess.”  
There was a long-stretched silence during which they both looked subtly somewhere else than at the other one.  
“Still sorry though,” Q said, because he felt that he had to at some point.  
“What for?”  
“That you had to witness... that,” Q elaborated, keeping his eyes trained on the bland white wall. “My panic attacks aren't really pretty and you shouldn't have had to deal with it.”  
“Q, don't be ridiculous.” James' tone was sharp enough to make him turn his head and look at the other man. “This isn't something you have to feel sorry for. It wasn't your fault. So don't give me that crap.”  
There was another long-stretched silence during which Q fidgeted with the corners of his blanket and tried to come up with a good answer to this, but couldn't think of anything to say.  
“I'm sorry for bringing you in that situation, though,” James said.

Q's brows furrowed. “There was no other possi-”  
“I know that. Didn't say I'm sorry for choosing the plane. There wasn't any other way. I'm sorry that I indirectly triggered your panic attack, though.”

Q snorted. “If I'm not allowed to apologize, then you aren't too, Bond.”

“James,” he corrected.

“Like I care.”

James let out a low chuckle and they again fell silent – which seemed to develop as some sort of habit, and was awkward and right at the same time.

“Why do you get them? The panic attacks I mean,” James asked.

Q cocked his head to the side, finger drawing patterns on the covers as he thought about the question.

“You don't have to answer, if you don't want to,” James said when he stayed silent.

“No, it's just... I guess I didn't really talk about it to someone who wasn't a therapist in a long time.”

He looked at James. “What gave you the impression that I don't just have a 'ordinary' phobia?”

“Your reaction was pretty severe. And some of the things you said during the panic attack...” James shrugged.

Q let out a sigh and rubbed his eyes with his hand.

“I was in a plane crash when I was eight.”

James looks at him silently, giving no reaction that he actually heard him aside from the slightly stiffer set of his shoulders.

“I had been applying for a private school in Germany for highly intelligent people, passed the tests and was flying back to England with my parents, when the engines of the plane malfunctioned. I don't remember that much from it actually happening, aside from... the p-panic and the fear.” His voice broke at the end and he drew in s shaking breath. “I regained consciousness shortly after the crash. The plane was burning and I couldn't see anything, smoke and flames everywhere and I had to claw my way out of the debris.”

His fingers clenched around the white sheets. Another shaking breath. He stared blankly at the light blue wall.

“Aside from me, only three other passengers survived, out of 56. My parents weren't among them.”

Suddenly, there was a gentle, warm pressure on his tense fingers and he looked down to see one of James' hand covering his in a comforting gesture.

The tension seeped from him and he slumped a bit against the pillows.

The legs of the chair scraped over the hospital floor as James leaned closer and slowly brought one of his arms up to Q's shoulder, like he was afraid that the other man might just bolt any moment.

Instead of fleeing, Q edged closer to James and pulled him closer by wrapping one of his arms around his waist. Seeing that the genius wasn't about to run away, James turned the awkward touching into a proper hug, strong arms encircling Q and holding him tight.

Q sank into the embrace, closing his eyes and relaxing against James' frame, strong and warm and breathing and alive.

“You know,” he said after a few long moments of comfortable quiet. “I've been seeing one of MI6's therapists since I started working there. M's orders. Never really wanted to confront the issue before, but I guess it's helping.”

“As long as your therapist isn't as bad as the psychologist that did my evaluation, you're good.”

“Think so. Just... no more planes for now.”

“Roger that.”


End file.
